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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   39286 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Redshirt the Boys

The value of a later start, which many teachers and administrators call “the gift of time,” is an open secret in elite circles. And it’s a gift overwhelmingly given to boys. In the past few months, I’ve interviewed dozens of private-school teachers, parents, educational consultants, and admissions officers, largely in the D.C. metro area. I learned that a delayed school entry is now close to the norm for boys who would otherwise be on the young side. One former head of an elite private school who now consults with parents on school choice and admissions told me, “There are effectively two different cutoff dates for school entry: one for boys and one for girls.”

On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it.

there was a discussion on ssc a while back about why boys underperform relative to girls in school. the most common explanation was that school is simply 'feminized', but maybe boys simply mature slower; the article certainly doesn't shy away from nature over nurture

The problem of self-regulation is much more severe for boys than for girls. Flooded with testosterone, which drives up dopamine activity, teenage boys are more inclined to take risks and seek short-term rewards than girls are. Meanwhile, the parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, and future orientation are mostly in the prefrontal cortex—the so-called CEO of the brain—which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.

Other relevant centers of the brain follow suit. The cerebellum, for example, plays a role in “emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,” according to Gokcen Akyurek, an expert on executive functioning at Hacettepe University, in Turkey. It reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Similarly, there are sex differences linked to the timing of puberty in the development of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that contributes to memory and learning.

this seems like a simple enough way to perhaps help boys stop falling behind in education.

I think boys who are slow early on in school are destined to be that way throughout life and and end up in the lower rungs of society. Relative positions do not change, and giving slow boys a boost early on is not going to change this once the effect wears off, like with with universal pre-k in which any early gains were quickly erased. Boys who grow up to be engineers, STEM jobs, etc. probably don't have this problem as much as boys who grow up to work in service sector. Even in elementary school you can identify who has potential compared to who doesn't. Boys may underperform relative to girls but struggling on the classroom to some extent suggests an IQ problem, not a sex differences problem. Hoping that intervention will remedy innate differences reminds me of people hoping that their crypto portfolios will recover. let's assume there is a 2 year difference in brain maturity between boys vs. girls..this would suggest that slow boys can make up the difference after their brains mature and perform better at school, but how often does this happen?

Is classwork actually primarily measuring IQ?

My memories are that schoolwork primarily measured ‘making academics a priority’ and ‘willingness to comply with arbitrary instructions’, with actual learning a rather distant third. As any parent of small children will tell you, girls want to please their authority figures and are generally more compliant, so it doesn’t surprise me that girls do better in school than boys.

Add in that schoolteachers are pretty female and thus presumably better at working with girls, and you have multiple explanations for why girls get better grades that aren’t IQ.

Is classwork actually primarily measuring IQ?

Given that IQ is chiefly a measure of academic potential I'd say probably yes. Where things get sketchy is in trying to map IQ to things like reasoning ability, social awareness, memory, erudition, etc...

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